Jul 13, 2012
Service to Israel Tugs at Arab Citizens’ Identity
Service to Israel Tugs at Arab Citizens’ Identity: The issue of Arab civilian service to Israel has revived the raw, decades-old conundrum of what it means to be both Arab and Israeli.
With influx of refugees, Syrian rebellion reaches deeper into heart of Damascus
With influx of refugees, Syrian rebellion reaches deeper into heart of Damascus:
DAMASCUS — The revolution that has engulfed much of Syria in bloodshed is now encroaching on the capital in ways that challenge long-held assumptions about President Bashar al-Assad’s hold on power even in the city presumed to be his stronghold.
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DAMASCUS — The revolution that has engulfed much of Syria in bloodshed is now encroaching on the capital in ways that challenge long-held assumptions about President Bashar al-Assad’s hold on power even in the city presumed to be his stronghold.
Read full article >>
Rep. Jesse Jackson’s political future in question
Rep. Jesse Jackson’s political future in question:
Hours before Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president at Invesco Field in Denver in 2008, Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) settled into the best seat in the house — front row, dead center. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) came along and sat next to him, and the entire arc of the American civil rights movement seemed contained in the moment.
Read full article >>
Hours before Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president at Invesco Field in Denver in 2008, Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) settled into the best seat in the house — front row, dead center. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) came along and sat next to him, and the entire arc of the American civil rights movement seemed contained in the moment.
Read full article >>
President Obama aware of alleged threat toward First Lady, spokesman says
President Obama aware of alleged threat toward First Lady, spokesman says:
President Obama has been notified of the threats a D.C. police officer is alleged to have made toward the first lady earlier this week, a spokesman for the president said Friday morning.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters traveling to Virginia with the president on Air Force One that Obama is “aware” that an officer, who worked as a motorcycle escort for White House officials and other dignitaries, had been moved to administrative duty Wednesday after he allegedly was overheard making threatening comments about Michelle Obama.
Read full article >>
President Obama has been notified of the threats a D.C. police officer is alleged to have made toward the first lady earlier this week, a spokesman for the president said Friday morning.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters traveling to Virginia with the president on Air Force One that Obama is “aware” that an officer, who worked as a motorcycle escort for White House officials and other dignitaries, had been moved to administrative duty Wednesday after he allegedly was overheard making threatening comments about Michelle Obama.
Read full article >>
News-Sharing Site Digg Sells for $500,000
News-Sharing Site Digg Sells for $500,000: Betaworks has agreed to buy news-sharing website Digg, in an attempt to revive a company that was early to social media but outmaneuvered by rivals.
Indonesian Islamic hardliners vow jihad for Rohingyas
Indonesian Islamic hardliners vow jihad for Rohingyas:
Comment - The Rohingya do not need friends like the FPI. Highly counter-productive. - John
The hardliners called on Muslims to go to Myanmar and "carry out jihad for your Muslim brothers" (AFP, Romeo Gacad)
JAKARTA — Hundreds of Islamic hardliners protested outside the Myanmar embassy in the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Friday to "stop the genocide" of Rohingya Muslims in the wake of deadly communal unrest.
Around 300 hardliners from organisations, including the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and Jemaah Anshorut Tauhid (JAT), threatened to storm the Myanmar embassy in Jakarta as some 50 police officers guarded the building.
Read more »Comment - The Rohingya do not need friends like the FPI. Highly counter-productive. - John
Mobile Money Most Popular in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda
Mobile Money Most Popular in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda: Many households in Africa send domestic remittances in cash. Mobile phone money transfers are filling this need in a few countries and prove better at reaching poor and rural residents than banks or standard money-transfer services.
Young U.S. Voters' Turnout Intentions Lagging
Young U.S. Voters' Turnout Intentions Lagging: The 58% of registered voters aged 18 to 29 who say they will definitely vote this fall is well below 2008 levels and is the lowest for any major subgroup. Black voter intentions are down from 2008 but are close to the national average.
Russia: Bring Natalia Estemirova’s Murderers to Justice
Russia: Bring Natalia Estemirova’s Murderers to Justice:
(Moscow) – The Russian authorities should finally bring to justice the killers of the leading Chechen right activist Natalia Estemirova, Human Rights Watch said today at a news conference in Moscow.
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The Russian authorities should finally bring to justice the killers of the leading Chechen right activist Natalia Estemirova, Human Rights Watch said today at a news conference in Moscow.
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China: Attempts to Seal Off Tibet from Outside Information
China: Attempts to Seal Off Tibet from Outside Information:
(New York) – Restrictions on news, media, and communications in Tibet have been stepped up by Chinese authorities in the lead-up to the 18th Party Congress, due to take place in late 2012.
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Restrictions on news, media, and communications in Tibet have been stepped up by Chinese authorities in the lead-up to the 18th Party Congress, due to take place in late 2012. The measures appear to be an effort to cut off Tibetans in Chinafrom news not subjected to the government’s domestic monopoly on information. They are presented officially as an attempt to prevent the views of the exiled Dalai Lama and his followers from reaching Tibetans inside China, particularly those living in rural areas.
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Potent Strain of Common Illness Deadly in Asia
Potent Strain of Common Illness Deadly in Asia:
Lesions caused by the hand, foot and mouth Virus on an 11-month-old boy. (Photo: MidgleyDJ / WikiMedia)HANOI, Vietnam—Tran Minh Giang has spent more than a third of his young life in a Vietnamese hospital, and it could be many months more before he can go home. All for a disease that in Asia is as common as chicken pox, and usually about as severe.
The 20-month-old boy was sickened by a particularly menacing form of hand, foot and mouth disease that has killed hundreds of young children across the region. They sometimes suffer high fever, brain swelling, paralysis and respiratory shutdown, even though they may have been infected by people with few or no symptoms.
When the strain hit Cambodia recently, doctors there had no idea what it was, and even now experts do not fully understand why it can be so devastating. Seven months after becoming sick, Giang still breathes using a ventilator connected to a hole in his tiny throat.
“It may take time, maybe years, before he can recover. When he sleeps, his lungs don’t work,” his father, Tran Nam Trung, said on Thursday while fanning the toddler. “When he first got a high fever, I didn’t think that he would be in a situation like this.”
The enterovirus 71 strain, or EV-71, raised fears earlier this week when it was detected in some lab samples taken after 52 of 59 Cambodian children died suddenly from a mystery illness that sparked international alarm. The World Health Organization (WHO) said via Twitter on Thursday that its investigation has found most cases were caused by the disease.
An expert at the UN health agency earlier said it’s the first time EV-71 had been identified in the country, but it is a well-known pathogen elsewhere in Asia. In the first half of this year alone, 356 people in China and 33 in Vietnam died from it.
The scale of the disease was clear last week on the crowded ground floor of a hospital in China’s hard-hit central Hunan Province. Dozens of crying children were packed into two small rooms, sitting or lying on chairs with IV drips hooked to them. Hunan reported 33 hand, foot and mouth disease deaths in May, a quarter of the country’s total that month.
The disease has exploded across the region since 1997, when the first major outbreak was reported in Malaysia. Since then, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Mongolia, Taiwan and Australia have all wrangled with it.
EV-71 is one of a group of viruses that cause the disease, but it has become a more dominant strain over the past decade in Asia. Still, only a small percentage of children infected experience severe symptoms, and experts are not exactly sure why. There is no vaccine or specific treatment to cure it, but severe cases are given supportive care and blood proteins are also sometimes administered intravenously.
“There’s a buildup of that susceptible population, like many viruses, and this happens to be the children who have not been exposed to different types of enteroviruses before,” said Dr. Zarifah Hussain Reed, co-author of a WHO report on hand, foot and mouth disease and medical director at a Malaysia-based biotech company researching a vaccine for it. “Then this buildup somehow explodes in a way that suddenly you get severe cases of EV-71.”
She added that it is unclear why it remains largely confined to certain parts of Asia—India and Indonesia, for instance, have not reported large outbreaks—and it is not understood if EV-71 is more infectious or perhaps just better at invading the neurological system than other strains.
The disease is in the same family as polio and gets its name from the telltale symptoms it causes, including rash, mouth sores and blisters covering the hands and feet. It mainly affects children younger than five, and is difficult to control because it spreads easily through sneezing, coughing and contact with fluid from sores or infected feces.
In daycare centers and schools, it’s nearly impossible to keep little blistered hands from coming into contact with other children and everything they touch. Another problem is that many infected kids never get sick, but they can still transmit the virus to others. Frequent hand-washing and disinfection of toys and surfaces are advised, and sometimes schools are forced to close to help halt the spread.
The first EV-71 infection with neurological symptoms was reported in California in 1969. Outbreaks have since occurred periodically in the US and Europe, but the disease has been a stubborn menace in Asia, typically occurring in cycles.
Some experts have warned that if the virus is not controlled, it can jump borders and threaten other regions as well. In fact, some wonder if the recent Cambodia cases could have spread from Vietnam, where about 63,000 cases have been reported so far this year.
Dr. Pham Nhat An, vice-director of the National Hospital of Pediatrics in Hanoi, says he has dealt with the disease for three decades. But it did not start killing until two years ago, when the number of hospitalized cases started to spike.
“It’s worrying,” he said. “We need to think about a vaccine. It will help, especially for the EV-71.”
In a unit on the other side of the building, the dedicated father, Trung, sits on the edge of a bed fanning little Giang, who probably caught the disease from a mildly ill cousin who was staying with them at the time.
Giang was just 13 months old when he began burning hot with fever. He did not seem overly sick and continued to play, so his parents believed it was a bug that would quickly pass. By morning, the baby was purple and convulsing. His lungs were shutting down.
Now the chubby boy can sit, and he occasionally musters a quick smile. But he remains lethargic, with tubes running out of his nose and throat. Trung had to quit his job to help his wife care for the child 24 hours a day in the hospital, which is common in many parts of Asia where nursing staff is thin.
“This is a very serious disease, and it can result in very serious health consequences,” Trung said. “People need to be very cautious and they need to strengthen surveillance to try to prevent the disease.”
Lesions caused by the hand, foot and mouth Virus on an 11-month-old boy. (Photo: MidgleyDJ / WikiMedia)
The 20-month-old boy was sickened by a particularly menacing form of hand, foot and mouth disease that has killed hundreds of young children across the region. They sometimes suffer high fever, brain swelling, paralysis and respiratory shutdown, even though they may have been infected by people with few or no symptoms.
When the strain hit Cambodia recently, doctors there had no idea what it was, and even now experts do not fully understand why it can be so devastating. Seven months after becoming sick, Giang still breathes using a ventilator connected to a hole in his tiny throat.
“It may take time, maybe years, before he can recover. When he sleeps, his lungs don’t work,” his father, Tran Nam Trung, said on Thursday while fanning the toddler. “When he first got a high fever, I didn’t think that he would be in a situation like this.”
The enterovirus 71 strain, or EV-71, raised fears earlier this week when it was detected in some lab samples taken after 52 of 59 Cambodian children died suddenly from a mystery illness that sparked international alarm. The World Health Organization (WHO) said via Twitter on Thursday that its investigation has found most cases were caused by the disease.
An expert at the UN health agency earlier said it’s the first time EV-71 had been identified in the country, but it is a well-known pathogen elsewhere in Asia. In the first half of this year alone, 356 people in China and 33 in Vietnam died from it.
The scale of the disease was clear last week on the crowded ground floor of a hospital in China’s hard-hit central Hunan Province. Dozens of crying children were packed into two small rooms, sitting or lying on chairs with IV drips hooked to them. Hunan reported 33 hand, foot and mouth disease deaths in May, a quarter of the country’s total that month.
The disease has exploded across the region since 1997, when the first major outbreak was reported in Malaysia. Since then, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Mongolia, Taiwan and Australia have all wrangled with it.
EV-71 is one of a group of viruses that cause the disease, but it has become a more dominant strain over the past decade in Asia. Still, only a small percentage of children infected experience severe symptoms, and experts are not exactly sure why. There is no vaccine or specific treatment to cure it, but severe cases are given supportive care and blood proteins are also sometimes administered intravenously.
“There’s a buildup of that susceptible population, like many viruses, and this happens to be the children who have not been exposed to different types of enteroviruses before,” said Dr. Zarifah Hussain Reed, co-author of a WHO report on hand, foot and mouth disease and medical director at a Malaysia-based biotech company researching a vaccine for it. “Then this buildup somehow explodes in a way that suddenly you get severe cases of EV-71.”
She added that it is unclear why it remains largely confined to certain parts of Asia—India and Indonesia, for instance, have not reported large outbreaks—and it is not understood if EV-71 is more infectious or perhaps just better at invading the neurological system than other strains.
The disease is in the same family as polio and gets its name from the telltale symptoms it causes, including rash, mouth sores and blisters covering the hands and feet. It mainly affects children younger than five, and is difficult to control because it spreads easily through sneezing, coughing and contact with fluid from sores or infected feces.
In daycare centers and schools, it’s nearly impossible to keep little blistered hands from coming into contact with other children and everything they touch. Another problem is that many infected kids never get sick, but they can still transmit the virus to others. Frequent hand-washing and disinfection of toys and surfaces are advised, and sometimes schools are forced to close to help halt the spread.
The first EV-71 infection with neurological symptoms was reported in California in 1969. Outbreaks have since occurred periodically in the US and Europe, but the disease has been a stubborn menace in Asia, typically occurring in cycles.
Some experts have warned that if the virus is not controlled, it can jump borders and threaten other regions as well. In fact, some wonder if the recent Cambodia cases could have spread from Vietnam, where about 63,000 cases have been reported so far this year.
Dr. Pham Nhat An, vice-director of the National Hospital of Pediatrics in Hanoi, says he has dealt with the disease for three decades. But it did not start killing until two years ago, when the number of hospitalized cases started to spike.
“It’s worrying,” he said. “We need to think about a vaccine. It will help, especially for the EV-71.”
In a unit on the other side of the building, the dedicated father, Trung, sits on the edge of a bed fanning little Giang, who probably caught the disease from a mildly ill cousin who was staying with them at the time.
Giang was just 13 months old when he began burning hot with fever. He did not seem overly sick and continued to play, so his parents believed it was a bug that would quickly pass. By morning, the baby was purple and convulsing. His lungs were shutting down.
Now the chubby boy can sit, and he occasionally musters a quick smile. But he remains lethargic, with tubes running out of his nose and throat. Trung had to quit his job to help his wife care for the child 24 hours a day in the hospital, which is common in many parts of Asia where nursing staff is thin.
“This is a very serious disease, and it can result in very serious health consequences,” Trung said. “People need to be very cautious and they need to strengthen surveillance to try to prevent the disease.”
Jul 12, 2012
Yahoo Investigates Password Breach
Yahoo Investigates Password Breach: Yahoo is investigating reports of a security breach that may have exposed nearly half a million users' email addresses and passwords.
Asia Moves to Thwart Slowdown
Asia Moves to Thwart Slowdown: Asian governments have begun a wave of stimulus measures to try to block a potential downward spiral
Factionalism in Vietnam
Factionalism in Vietnam:
Today on ForeignPolicy.com, I published an article discussing the cracks in Vietnam’s socialist-market economy. The main problem, I and others have argued, is the rotten politics and in-fighting within the Communist Party (kudos to Carl Thayer), which has helped foster the bad economics.
Top party leaders, along with rising provincial and local figures, have become too comfortable with the largesse gained from three decades of market liberalization. They seem to be increasingly in a deadlock over the pace of “reforms” that could take from their spoils (although the word “reform” doesn’t quite capture the breadth of what’s going on). Once a promising emerging market, Vietnam seems to be a hitting a plateau as each economic solution only brings about more problems. The regional slump is only partially to blame.
Which leads me to the deeper questions: To what extent does the central party hold real power anymore, compared to all the rising provincial and local elites thanks to decentralization? And could an attempt to rein in the new players explain the very public humiliations of Vinalines, Vinashin, Dang Thi Hoan Yen, and the prime minister, all over the past few years?
In his book Vietnam: Rethinking the State, Martin Gainsborough offers a revealing explanation when looking at the increase in large corruption cases since the late 1990s . He argues that the central party-state is trying to reassert control over the periphery, undertaking “thrusts of recentralization.”
To the Hanoi-ologists out there, this might be old news. But what about Vietnam’s parallels to other Southeast Asian nations — Malaysia and its economy, perhaps?
Today on ForeignPolicy.com, I published an article discussing the cracks in Vietnam’s socialist-market economy. The main problem, I and others have argued, is the rotten politics and in-fighting within the Communist Party (kudos to Carl Thayer), which has helped foster the bad economics.
Top party leaders, along with rising provincial and local figures, have become too comfortable with the largesse gained from three decades of market liberalization. They seem to be increasingly in a deadlock over the pace of “reforms” that could take from their spoils (although the word “reform” doesn’t quite capture the breadth of what’s going on). Once a promising emerging market, Vietnam seems to be a hitting a plateau as each economic solution only brings about more problems. The regional slump is only partially to blame.
Which leads me to the deeper questions: To what extent does the central party hold real power anymore, compared to all the rising provincial and local elites thanks to decentralization? And could an attempt to rein in the new players explain the very public humiliations of Vinalines, Vinashin, Dang Thi Hoan Yen, and the prime minister, all over the past few years?
In his book Vietnam: Rethinking the State, Martin Gainsborough offers a revealing explanation when looking at the increase in large corruption cases since the late 1990s . He argues that the central party-state is trying to reassert control over the periphery, undertaking “thrusts of recentralization.”
To the Hanoi-ologists out there, this might be old news. But what about Vietnam’s parallels to other Southeast Asian nations — Malaysia and its economy, perhaps?
Lao history: Don’t look back
Lao history: Don’t look back:
In a NM series he called ‘Starting Points’ Nicholas Farrelly attempted to prompt discussion about countries in Southeast Asia Asia by focusing on individual books, and he chose my Politics of Ritual and Remembrance: Laos Since 1975 (1988) for his ‘Starting points: Laos in 1975’. He kindly remarked that it “is still one of the crucial texts.” But he had “no doubt that even since Evans’ work in the 1990s the conceptualisation of the revolution and its pivotal year has changed significantly. There is still much to say about 1975 and all that.” Indeed, there is.
Oliver Tappe recently asked me if I had considered producing a revised edition of PR&R and I replied that he was doing a pretty good job himself in his various articles. And, I had no wish to. But if I did produce a new edition of this book about social and political memory it would now have a chapter called ‘Forgetting Socialism.’ As I remarked in the original book, by the mid-1990s almost half the Lao population had been born since the fall of the Royal Lao Government and they had no concrete memory of it. Today more-or-less half the population has grown up since the collapse of Stalinist communism around 1990, and they have no memory of restrictions on personal movement and calls to build socialism. There is no examination of this period inside the country and it has become a kind of blank space.
I have, however, revised my Short History of Laos: The Land Inbetween (2002) twice. First, for the editions that were translated into both Lao and Thai and published in 2006. Here the main revision involved splitting the chapter on the Lao PDR into two, with a new chapter called ‘post-socialism.’ The Lao translation did not endear me to at least some people in the foreign ministry and they refused my request for a research visa. Since 2009, however, I have had an expert’s visa through the Lao Institute for Social Sciences. (Short memories again?)
In 2011 a more thoroughly revised edition was published in Chinese by a Shanghai publisher, Orient Publishing Center, called simply Lao History.
In July 2012 the same text, plus or minus, appeared in English, published by Silkworm Books as a ‘Revised edition’. In it I have I tried to incorporate the insights I gleaned from Richard McGregor’s, The Party: The Secret World of Chinese Communism (2010) where he documents the pervasive control and influence of the communist party in China, despite liberalization. Much the same is true in Laos, and it would be nice to think that someone was working on a similar book about the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party.
Indeed, the recent reforms in Myanmar underline the differences between authoritarian and militaristic regimes and Marxist-Leninist ones. Aung Sang Suu Kyi would never have survived in Laos, Vietnam or China. It is something worth examining in depth.
Nicholas Farrelly invites further thoughts on post-1975 Laos, and in my revised edition I do just that in my final paragraph:
In a NM series he called ‘Starting Points’ Nicholas Farrelly attempted to prompt discussion about countries in Southeast Asia Asia by focusing on individual books, and he chose my Politics of Ritual and Remembrance: Laos Since 1975 (1988) for his ‘Starting points: Laos in 1975’. He kindly remarked that it “is still one of the crucial texts.” But he had “no doubt that even since Evans’ work in the 1990s the conceptualisation of the revolution and its pivotal year has changed significantly. There is still much to say about 1975 and all that.” Indeed, there is.
Oliver Tappe recently asked me if I had considered producing a revised edition of PR&R and I replied that he was doing a pretty good job himself in his various articles. And, I had no wish to. But if I did produce a new edition of this book about social and political memory it would now have a chapter called ‘Forgetting Socialism.’ As I remarked in the original book, by the mid-1990s almost half the Lao population had been born since the fall of the Royal Lao Government and they had no concrete memory of it. Today more-or-less half the population has grown up since the collapse of Stalinist communism around 1990, and they have no memory of restrictions on personal movement and calls to build socialism. There is no examination of this period inside the country and it has become a kind of blank space.
I have, however, revised my Short History of Laos: The Land Inbetween (2002) twice. First, for the editions that were translated into both Lao and Thai and published in 2006. Here the main revision involved splitting the chapter on the Lao PDR into two, with a new chapter called ‘post-socialism.’ The Lao translation did not endear me to at least some people in the foreign ministry and they refused my request for a research visa. Since 2009, however, I have had an expert’s visa through the Lao Institute for Social Sciences. (Short memories again?)
In 2011 a more thoroughly revised edition was published in Chinese by a Shanghai publisher, Orient Publishing Center, called simply Lao History.
In July 2012 the same text, plus or minus, appeared in English, published by Silkworm Books as a ‘Revised edition’. In it I have I tried to incorporate the insights I gleaned from Richard McGregor’s, The Party: The Secret World of Chinese Communism (2010) where he documents the pervasive control and influence of the communist party in China, despite liberalization. Much the same is true in Laos, and it would be nice to think that someone was working on a similar book about the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party.
Indeed, the recent reforms in Myanmar underline the differences between authoritarian and militaristic regimes and Marxist-Leninist ones. Aung Sang Suu Kyi would never have survived in Laos, Vietnam or China. It is something worth examining in depth.
Nicholas Farrelly invites further thoughts on post-1975 Laos, and in my revised edition I do just that in my final paragraph:
When the first edition of this book was written 10 years ago the collapse of global communism in the early 1990s was still fresh in my mind and it was not clear how the remaining socialist states, including Laos, would fare. In 2011 it is clear that they have fared very well, and they are likely to be with us for the next two or three decades. But one must quickly add, they are no longer recognizably socialist, while the one party state has become an instrument for the development of capitalism. People like me who were intellectually formed during the hey-day of the Cold War and at the end of almost a century of competition between revolutionary socialism and liberal democracies were unprepared for the transformation of Marxist-Leninist states into something more mainstream; merely another variant of the many paths that countries globally have taken into the modern world – for better or worse. Countries like Laos still carry baggage from the attempt to build socialism, but bit by bit it is being thrown overboard. The majority of the world’s and Laos’s population born since 1990 do not feel part of some global ideological struggle, but are simply swept along by an imperfect everyday reality. The hegemonic global mantra is ‘development,’ an often vague term promising a better future, and almost anything can be justified just by invoking it. It is a kind of modern magic, and it trumps any other card in the deck, including preservation of ‘a beautiful, ancient Lao culture,’ in the precious phrasing of the Lao Ministry of Information and Culture. Lao hope they can have their cake and eat it too; that they can have rapid all-round development that leaves their culture intact. This, however, is impossible. Lao culture and society is about to change much faster than anyone has anticipated, but just how much will remain of the culture that Lao now find so comforting and foreigners so charming, only time will tell.
Review of The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk
Review of The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk:
Justin McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv, 327; photographs, bibliography, index.
Reviewed by Erick White.
Few scholarly monographs in recent years have risked making large arguments about the breadth and depth of Thai Buddhism as a whole. Fewer still have critically reflected on the various long-standing assumptions and models which have shaped the academic study of Thai Buddhism. Justin McDaniel’s The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand pursues both of these challenges, and does so with passion, wit, insight and care. McDaniel explicitly seeks to upend established descriptions, interpretations and theories regarding the character and dynamics of Thai religiosity in the present and the past. This ambitious rethinking is, moreover, solidly grounded in a broad and deep substantive knowledge of Thai Buddhism, as both a textual tradition of scholasticism and a living tradition of practice, as well as an impressive familiarity with the wide scope of existing academic studies in English, Thai and other languages. As a result, this monograph will likely serve for years to come as a benchmark in the study of Thai Buddhism, and McDaniel’s arguments, claims and interpretations will be advanced, debated and critiqued by future scholars seeking to elucidate Thai Buddhism with the same care and insight he has displayed.
While ranging broadly across the full expanse of past and present Thai Buddhism, McDaniel concentrates most centrally on four specific topical foci: sacred biographies, protective magical texts, devotional rituals and liturgies, and vernacular religious art. In the process, he fruitfully brings into his discussion and opens up for investigation a range of source materials typically neglected in the study of Thai Buddhism, materials such as films, murals, ritual calendars, amulets, regional liturgies, statuary, hagiographies, comic books, CDs, and tourism performances. Accordingly, the substantive picture of Thai Buddhism conveyed is richer, more idiosyncratic and less tied to the stereotypic representations typically conveyed by Thai authorities, foreign scholars or casual observation. Providing structure within and across this buzzing diversity is McDaniel’s repeated use of the figures of Mae Nak (“the lovelorn ghost”, of his book’s title) and Somdet To (“the magical monk”). As two neglected figures within academic studies of Thai Buddhist history and mythology, they provide numerous illustrative examples of his more general points. The end result is an illuminating look at familiar concerns, but one which asks new questions from unusual angles via the use of unconventional materials.
After framing the general analytical and interpretive approach of his study in the Introduction, McDaniel proceeds in the next four chapters to unpack in considerable detail the empirical and interpretive significance of his four neglected thematic topics, before closing with an impassioned call for a new approach to the study of Thai Buddhism. Chapter I centers on an examination of hagiography, focusing on the biographical tales told about Somdet To, a high-ranking Bangkok monk of the nineteenth century who is regarded by many as the most famous and popular Buddhist saint in contemporary Central Thailand. Through the stories told about this monk and the uses made of him by contemporary Thai Buddhists, McDaniel seeks to challenge common assumptions that elites dominate religious discourse, that Buddhism is primarily about meditation and world peace, and that Thai saints only exemplify certain canonical values such as nonattachment and indifference.
In Chapter II, attention shifts to religious texts, their multiple mediums of transmission, and their various social uses, focusing especially on the Jinapanjara, a protective magical incantation written by Somdet To. In the course of examining the social life of this text across vernacular scriptures, hand-books, CDs, shrines, films and chanting clubs, McDaniel critically examines ideas of the esoteric and the magical in contemporary academic studies of Thai Buddhism.
Chapter III explores in depth the cacophonous ritual calendar of Buddhist Thailand, the complicated history of modern liturgical chanting manuals, and the idiosyncratically expansive pantheon of deities that contemporary Thais supplicate. Central to all of these discussions is McDaniel’s criticism that, contrary to many scholars’ assertions, there has not been a pronounced standardization and homogenization of Buddhist belief and practice over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that dynamism, debate and diversity have in fact flourished.
In Chapter IV, vernacular religious art and its social reception takes center stage, as statues, shrines, amulets and murals are examined in terms of their material aesthetics, associational logics and social uses. McDaniel’s overarching goal here is to investigate the material and artistic culture of Buddhist Thailand within its local historical and performative contexts rather than the more common art-historical frames of canonical iconography, aesthetic styles and Indian precursors.
The illumination, appeal and persuasiveness of McDaniel’s various arguments are due to a variety of literary and stylistic elements beyond those arguments’ interpretive and logical strengths. For one thing, the rhetorical style of the monograph is for the most part conversational and non-technical. Whether describing the spatial layout of the temple that houses Mae Nak’s shrine in Bangkok or examining arguments about the Tantric character of popular Thai Buddhism, McDaniel’s discussions remain accessible to and informative for the general reader. In addition, the monograph is richly descriptive and packed with numerous examples of each of the general topics explored. There is in fact an embarrassment of descriptive riches, as McDaniel explicates film narratives of Somdet To, describes temple murals depicting hell, reports on a shrine grotto dedicated to Somdet To, or unpacks the scriptural components of regional liturgies. This attention to comprehensive descriptive detail grabs the reader’s attention and richly conveys the subject under discussion. At the same time, McDaniel’s accounts are peppered with evocative personal vignettes of his explorations, discoveries and realizations in the field, such that the reader frequently has a sense of standing alongside the scholar as insights are made. Lastly, McDaniel’s arguments are built on a broad and deep foundation of scholarship, and expanded upon in sometimes quite extensive footnotes that tell stories unto themselves. Most noteworthy in this regard is the seriousness with which the author takes Thai-language primary sources and scholarly works, integrating them extensively into his scholarly framework.
Aside from any of its specific interpretive and theoretical arguments, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk is also noteworthy for its general approach to the study of Thai Buddhism. The book consistently highlights the cacophony of voices and individual agents at work in contemporary Thai religiosity, emphasizing in particular the ambiguous and potentially contradictory character of Buddhist beliefs and practices as lived realities. It seeks to document the everyday and everyman of mainstream religiosity, rather than focusing upon the elite or the official, the dominant or the marginalized. McDaniel’s arguments consistently return to aesthetics, practices, technologies and repertoires, rather than focusing on theologies, worldviews, canonical teachings and official doctrines. The monograph relentlessly examines Buddhism inThailand in its full local, historical messiness, rather than seeking explanation by appeals to the idea of Theravada Buddhism in general or Indian Buddhist precursors. Moreover, the book prioritizes and seeks to vindicate the practical and worldly concerns of Thai Buddhism in contrast to those soteriological and transcendent dimensions that most normative discussions of Buddhism emphasize. The book’s arguments consistently privilege and emphasize the assumptions and statements of Thai informants over scholarly theoretical and explanatory models, regardless of how much the former fail to conform to the expectations of the latter. As an exploration of the historical, social and performative contexts of practical, everyday religious behavior, the book is, as McDaniel makes explicit, “an exercise in following, listening to and seeing individual Buddhist agents” (p. 19). In all of these ways, this monograph represents an exemplary model that one hopes will inspire future scholarly work guided by these same principles.
At the same time, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk is a sustained, informed investigation of a diverse set of foundational, but frequently neglected, methodological, substantive, interpretive, analytical and theoretical issues in the academic study of Thai Buddhism. Many general technical and academic debates frequently linger under the surface of McDaniel’s descriptions and arguments, even as he also explicitly engages with a variety of specific scholarly theses, models and theories. McDaniel is forthright and opinionated as he passes judgment on the analyses and interpretations offered in the work of scholars, named and unnamed, who have preceded him. As a result, the monograph exemplifies, provokes and demands greater self-reflexivity regarding the general theories, analytic frames, conceptual models, interpretive categories and empirical conclusions which scholars have advanced in the study of Thai Buddhism. Inevitably, however, such self-reflection is deeply shaped by the disciplinary training that every scholar brings to the subject at hand.
Inspired by McDaniel’s spirited response to prior scholarship, what follows is a more extended series of critical reflections on some of the technical academic arguments advanced explicitly and implicitly by The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk. I approach these arguments, and the broader scholarly issues that they raise, from the perspective of an anthropologist, rather than that of a religious-studies scholar. My hope is that this contrasting disciplinary perspective will prove illuminating as I seek critically to rethink many of the important arguments, ideas and positions that McDaniel advances.
This review is available in its entirety here.
Erick White has carried out research on the sub-culture of professional spirit mediums in Bangkok. Most recently he served as an adjunct instructor in Antioch University’s “Buddhist Studies in India” program in Bodh Gaya, Bihar.
Justin McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv, 327; photographs, bibliography, index.
Reviewed by Erick White.
Few scholarly monographs in recent years have risked making large arguments about the breadth and depth of Thai Buddhism as a whole. Fewer still have critically reflected on the various long-standing assumptions and models which have shaped the academic study of Thai Buddhism. Justin McDaniel’s The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand pursues both of these challenges, and does so with passion, wit, insight and care. McDaniel explicitly seeks to upend established descriptions, interpretations and theories regarding the character and dynamics of Thai religiosity in the present and the past. This ambitious rethinking is, moreover, solidly grounded in a broad and deep substantive knowledge of Thai Buddhism, as both a textual tradition of scholasticism and a living tradition of practice, as well as an impressive familiarity with the wide scope of existing academic studies in English, Thai and other languages. As a result, this monograph will likely serve for years to come as a benchmark in the study of Thai Buddhism, and McDaniel’s arguments, claims and interpretations will be advanced, debated and critiqued by future scholars seeking to elucidate Thai Buddhism with the same care and insight he has displayed.
While ranging broadly across the full expanse of past and present Thai Buddhism, McDaniel concentrates most centrally on four specific topical foci: sacred biographies, protective magical texts, devotional rituals and liturgies, and vernacular religious art. In the process, he fruitfully brings into his discussion and opens up for investigation a range of source materials typically neglected in the study of Thai Buddhism, materials such as films, murals, ritual calendars, amulets, regional liturgies, statuary, hagiographies, comic books, CDs, and tourism performances. Accordingly, the substantive picture of Thai Buddhism conveyed is richer, more idiosyncratic and less tied to the stereotypic representations typically conveyed by Thai authorities, foreign scholars or casual observation. Providing structure within and across this buzzing diversity is McDaniel’s repeated use of the figures of Mae Nak (“the lovelorn ghost”, of his book’s title) and Somdet To (“the magical monk”). As two neglected figures within academic studies of Thai Buddhist history and mythology, they provide numerous illustrative examples of his more general points. The end result is an illuminating look at familiar concerns, but one which asks new questions from unusual angles via the use of unconventional materials.
After framing the general analytical and interpretive approach of his study in the Introduction, McDaniel proceeds in the next four chapters to unpack in considerable detail the empirical and interpretive significance of his four neglected thematic topics, before closing with an impassioned call for a new approach to the study of Thai Buddhism. Chapter I centers on an examination of hagiography, focusing on the biographical tales told about Somdet To, a high-ranking Bangkok monk of the nineteenth century who is regarded by many as the most famous and popular Buddhist saint in contemporary Central Thailand. Through the stories told about this monk and the uses made of him by contemporary Thai Buddhists, McDaniel seeks to challenge common assumptions that elites dominate religious discourse, that Buddhism is primarily about meditation and world peace, and that Thai saints only exemplify certain canonical values such as nonattachment and indifference.
In Chapter II, attention shifts to religious texts, their multiple mediums of transmission, and their various social uses, focusing especially on the Jinapanjara, a protective magical incantation written by Somdet To. In the course of examining the social life of this text across vernacular scriptures, hand-books, CDs, shrines, films and chanting clubs, McDaniel critically examines ideas of the esoteric and the magical in contemporary academic studies of Thai Buddhism.
Chapter III explores in depth the cacophonous ritual calendar of Buddhist Thailand, the complicated history of modern liturgical chanting manuals, and the idiosyncratically expansive pantheon of deities that contemporary Thais supplicate. Central to all of these discussions is McDaniel’s criticism that, contrary to many scholars’ assertions, there has not been a pronounced standardization and homogenization of Buddhist belief and practice over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that dynamism, debate and diversity have in fact flourished.
In Chapter IV, vernacular religious art and its social reception takes center stage, as statues, shrines, amulets and murals are examined in terms of their material aesthetics, associational logics and social uses. McDaniel’s overarching goal here is to investigate the material and artistic culture of Buddhist Thailand within its local historical and performative contexts rather than the more common art-historical frames of canonical iconography, aesthetic styles and Indian precursors.
The illumination, appeal and persuasiveness of McDaniel’s various arguments are due to a variety of literary and stylistic elements beyond those arguments’ interpretive and logical strengths. For one thing, the rhetorical style of the monograph is for the most part conversational and non-technical. Whether describing the spatial layout of the temple that houses Mae Nak’s shrine in Bangkok or examining arguments about the Tantric character of popular Thai Buddhism, McDaniel’s discussions remain accessible to and informative for the general reader. In addition, the monograph is richly descriptive and packed with numerous examples of each of the general topics explored. There is in fact an embarrassment of descriptive riches, as McDaniel explicates film narratives of Somdet To, describes temple murals depicting hell, reports on a shrine grotto dedicated to Somdet To, or unpacks the scriptural components of regional liturgies. This attention to comprehensive descriptive detail grabs the reader’s attention and richly conveys the subject under discussion. At the same time, McDaniel’s accounts are peppered with evocative personal vignettes of his explorations, discoveries and realizations in the field, such that the reader frequently has a sense of standing alongside the scholar as insights are made. Lastly, McDaniel’s arguments are built on a broad and deep foundation of scholarship, and expanded upon in sometimes quite extensive footnotes that tell stories unto themselves. Most noteworthy in this regard is the seriousness with which the author takes Thai-language primary sources and scholarly works, integrating them extensively into his scholarly framework.
Aside from any of its specific interpretive and theoretical arguments, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk is also noteworthy for its general approach to the study of Thai Buddhism. The book consistently highlights the cacophony of voices and individual agents at work in contemporary Thai religiosity, emphasizing in particular the ambiguous and potentially contradictory character of Buddhist beliefs and practices as lived realities. It seeks to document the everyday and everyman of mainstream religiosity, rather than focusing upon the elite or the official, the dominant or the marginalized. McDaniel’s arguments consistently return to aesthetics, practices, technologies and repertoires, rather than focusing on theologies, worldviews, canonical teachings and official doctrines. The monograph relentlessly examines Buddhism inThailand in its full local, historical messiness, rather than seeking explanation by appeals to the idea of Theravada Buddhism in general or Indian Buddhist precursors. Moreover, the book prioritizes and seeks to vindicate the practical and worldly concerns of Thai Buddhism in contrast to those soteriological and transcendent dimensions that most normative discussions of Buddhism emphasize. The book’s arguments consistently privilege and emphasize the assumptions and statements of Thai informants over scholarly theoretical and explanatory models, regardless of how much the former fail to conform to the expectations of the latter. As an exploration of the historical, social and performative contexts of practical, everyday religious behavior, the book is, as McDaniel makes explicit, “an exercise in following, listening to and seeing individual Buddhist agents” (p. 19). In all of these ways, this monograph represents an exemplary model that one hopes will inspire future scholarly work guided by these same principles.
At the same time, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk is a sustained, informed investigation of a diverse set of foundational, but frequently neglected, methodological, substantive, interpretive, analytical and theoretical issues in the academic study of Thai Buddhism. Many general technical and academic debates frequently linger under the surface of McDaniel’s descriptions and arguments, even as he also explicitly engages with a variety of specific scholarly theses, models and theories. McDaniel is forthright and opinionated as he passes judgment on the analyses and interpretations offered in the work of scholars, named and unnamed, who have preceded him. As a result, the monograph exemplifies, provokes and demands greater self-reflexivity regarding the general theories, analytic frames, conceptual models, interpretive categories and empirical conclusions which scholars have advanced in the study of Thai Buddhism. Inevitably, however, such self-reflection is deeply shaped by the disciplinary training that every scholar brings to the subject at hand.
Inspired by McDaniel’s spirited response to prior scholarship, what follows is a more extended series of critical reflections on some of the technical academic arguments advanced explicitly and implicitly by The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk. I approach these arguments, and the broader scholarly issues that they raise, from the perspective of an anthropologist, rather than that of a religious-studies scholar. My hope is that this contrasting disciplinary perspective will prove illuminating as I seek critically to rethink many of the important arguments, ideas and positions that McDaniel advances.
This review is available in its entirety here.
Erick White has carried out research on the sub-culture of professional spirit mediums in Bangkok. Most recently he served as an adjunct instructor in Antioch University’s “Buddhist Studies in India” program in Bodh Gaya, Bihar.
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